Ah, the joy of CSS!

10 years ago, if someone wanted to change the colours on their website to give it a bit of a tweak and a spruce , it would have meant changing interminable numbers of bits of code hidden deep within seemingly infinitely nested tables. In other words, a right pain.

Nowadays it usually means amending a few files, tweaking a few graphics and Bob is pretty much your uncle. It’s good if you’re the person doing the updating, but it’s also good for the client as it can be very affordable (a couple of days rather than a couple of weeks).

As an example, we’ve just finished a quick colour scheme overhaul for mindfulness teacher & trainer, Trish Bartley, who wanted to move away from her old pink and brown colour scheme to something a bit cleaner and more striking. Here’s what we did:

BEFORE

AFTER

New website launched for Wobage Potter Jeremy Steward – http://jeremysteward.co.uk/, with some gorgeous photos by JP Kavanagh. The site features multiple slideshows, an integrated (email) newsletter, Facebook integration (one click posting from the WordPress backend to Jeremy’s Facebook page) and lots more besides.

The large image on the front page changes each time you come back to the site, or you can refresh your browser window for a sneak preview!

We’re always pleased when jobs come along that require us to stretch our knowledge and learn new skills, so when the Welsh School of Aromatherapy rang to ask if we would be interested in building a bilingual site (Welsh and English) for them, we were only too pleased to help.

We’ve done lots of bilingual websites in the past of course, but this was the first time we’d tried to apply our skills using WordPress as a CMS, in two languages and with direct translation from one page to its equivalent in the other language.

The plugin we opted for in the end was xLanguage by the extremely helpful HelloSam which, whilst our php skills weren’t really prepared for such a steep learning curve (and with several very supportive pointers in the right direction from Sam), did eventually do exactly what we wanted it to do. In the process we also ended up creating a welsh version of Mike Cherim’s excellent Secure Contact Form. There’s a few bits in the welsh language file which still need translating, but once we find someone to do those, we’ll send Mike the finished version to add to the download. In the meantime if anyone wants the incomplete version (it’s just missing a few error messages) drop us a line. You can see the file in action on the Aromatherapy Wales site.

Thankfully, the work wasn’t all coding and we did find time to have fun with some of the School’s ideas for a logo. The first go at this was a graphic version of a narcissus which, whilst it worked fine, didn’t really hit the spot. But salvation came in the form of David Attenborough, as usual, whose beautiful show Amazing Rare Things at the Queen’s Gallery included an illustration of a poet’s narcissus, apparently the first narcissus to arrive on British shores way back when.

We’re also planning to make the theme available along with some instructions as to how to set up xlanguage to work in Welsh and English (if only to remind us how to do it). More on that story later.

After a bit of a lull whilst we got on with a load of projects, we’re very pleased to see our hard graft come to fruition with the launch of a new site for Ros Tennyson. Ros works in the field of international development, for organisations such as the International Business Leader’s Forum and the Partnering Initiative.

Ros wanted to set up an informal but informative personal website to help spread the word about the work she’s doing internationally for the IBLF, Trigonos and others as well as to set up a platform for her other interests, writings and publications. Ros had also come across Maria Hayes, a North Wales based illustrator and artist (and client of papergecko) and commissioned Maria to produce a series of illustrations to use on the site and the associated publicity material.

The website address is: http://www.rostennyson.info

Back in the Summer of 2007, we did a spot of work for pottery course providers Workshops at Wobage, automating their booking form and trying to wrangle their html to improve search engine rankings for their key search phrases. The work was pretty successful, with fully booked courses and a brief spot at Number One (on Google for “Summer Pottery Courses” – they’ve slipped to number 5 in the meantime, but we hope to address that soon).

So, when Wobage came to update their site for the 2008 ceramics course syllabus, they got back in touch. We suggested that, rather than having to pay a web designer every time they need to update the site, we could redesign the site from scratch and build a user-friendly Content Management System at the same time.

We’re currently finalising colour schemes and page layout, and hope to relaunch a standards-based, accessible, user and search engine friendly site in the coming months.